The Lure

5 The Castle

The icy air had a freshening effect on Petrie, even at twenty to six in the morning. It was the same silver BMW and the same wrinkled driver. The cavernous boot swallowed up Petrie’s rucksack like a whale devouring a minnow. He kept a canvas bag with papers beside him, and settled into the back seat.

The car drove a few hundred yards along the road and turned into the front of the Hotel Europa.

Miss Lonely Planet.

The driver heaved her rucksack into the boot as if it was full of rocks. As she settled into the car beside him, Petrie saw that she was lightly made up. He caught a whiff of scent. She had an open, almost naive smile.

‘I do planets.’ Her voice was soft and curiously graceful. She wasn’t a native English speaker.

The car took off, the driver muttering something under his breath.

Petrie said, ‘I saw you at Heathrow.’

‘I saw you too. I spotted you at Vienna airport and then on the streets here, last night. It was too much of a coincidence.’

‘I’ve been warned not to speak to strange women.’

She gave a wicked smile, stuck her legs out and wiggled her feet. She was wearing walking boots and her slender ankles made them seem over-large.

‘And then I got another warning. It was vague but I took it to mean I might be followed.’

She asked, ‘How do you know I’m not a strange woman following you?’

‘You weren’t trying to look inconspicuous.’ She was in fact extremely conspicuous but Petrie didn’t want to mention that.

She gave a worried little nod. ‘Should we be trusting each other?’ Her voice had a slightly sing-song quality — Scandinavian, he thought. It fitted with the pure blonde hair.

‘Who says I trust you?’

‘This is like something out of a spy movie. Any idea what it’s about?’ She tilted her head slightly.

‘No.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a mathematician. Nobody understands me, I work on ferociously specialised stuff.’

‘What sort of ferociously specialised stuff?’

‘I suppose you’d call it pattern recognition. At the moment I’m doing knots.’

‘You mean like in string?’

‘Yes, only I do them in four-dimensional space.’

‘I can’t visualise that. No wonder nobody understands you. Anyway, it sounds useless.’

‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve found links with quantum theory and cryptography.’ He patted his canvas bag as if it contained the secrets of the Universe. ‘And you?’

‘I’m a planetary scientist. Again a specialised area: extrasolar planetary systems.’

The car was warm and Petrie unbuttoned his jacket. ‘Planets and patterns. I wonder how they connect?’ He gazed out of the window at the dark mid-European streets and the unfamiliar skyline. Then: ‘This is the car they collected me in from Vienna.’

‘I had a Mercedes. But we were on the same flight. We could have shared a car, and even had the same hotel.’

‘Exactly. Someone didn’t want us seen together.’

The car had now taken them clear of Bratislava on to a broad four-laned highway. The dark sky was lightening to grey. After ten swift minutes, the driver slowed and turned on to a quiet side road, lined with snow-covered fields. Here the headlights lit up a wall of fog, limiting visibility to a couple of hundred yards.

‘Do you think he speaks English?’ Miss Lonely Planet whispered.

Petrie said, ‘You’ve exposed a breast,’ while looking at the man’s eyes in the mirror. They didn’t flicker.

‘No, he doesn’t. Sorry about that.’

She laughed.

‘I’m Petrie. Tom, Tommy or Thomas depending on how you feel. From Dublin. So which part of Scandinavia are you from?’

‘Freya Størmer,’ she said, and they finally shook hands. ‘From north of the Arctic Circle. Tromsø, to be exact.’

Petrie looked out uneasily at the fields and woods. In his imagination, he saw black bears roaming the forests. He wondered again what was bringing him out to these hinterlands. The trees looked black against the white snow and he had a brief, unsettling illusion of living inside a photographic negative.

Patterns and planets. Planets and prime ministers. Don’t speak to strange women. A strange woman at his side. Beware of devouring lions.

How do they connect? How?

His new companion was smiling at some private joke. ‘You do planets. What exactly?’ Petrie asked.

‘At the moment? I’m part of ESA’s Darwin team.’

‘Darwin?’

‘A space-based interferometer. The European Space Agency are due to launch it next year. They’re big mirrors with a long baseline which should be able to make out gross features like continents on Earth-sized planets round the nearest stars.’

‘That’s still not quite exact.’

‘They want me to predict biological signatures for Darwin to search for.’ They were into a village and running a gauntlet of neat, small houses, each one managing to be different from the others.

‘Like what?’

‘Like spectrum lines belonging to ozone or oxygen. Best seen in the ultraviolet. Oxygen is so reactive that if we see any at all on a planet there has to be biology at work producing it. Another…’

Suddenly, heavy metal blasted their ears from eight speakers. Startled, Freya shook her head and shrugged, and by mutual consent they attempted no further conversation. The driver switched off the big car’s halogen beams.

Presently the road, now covered with compacted snow, began to climb steeply through a forest. The driver switched the heavy rock off and concentrated on a series of hairpin bends. Petrie found that his ears were ringing. He was now shaking slightly, whether due to nervous anticipation, or the driving, or the aftermath of the ACDC explosion, he couldn’t say. On the next bend, the driver turned to the couple and said, ‘Malé Karpaty,’ in a cigarette-hoarse voice.

The Little Carpathians. Dracula country. Petrie had a brief, movie-driven fantasy about isolated villages, Frankenstein monsters and grim, isolated castles.

The road levelled, there was a little lodge house and cables stretching up into the mist, and then the mountain pass was plunging steeply and Petrie’s ears were popping with the swift change in altitude. At the foot of the pass the driver turned left on to a narrow lane.

Petrie sensed that they were reaching journey’s end, realised that his fists were clenched with tension. By contrast, the young woman at his side seemed relaxed.

Past a tiny ochre church with a thin green spire. Something massive, dimly glimpsed through the mist and then lost behind trees. Another climb, and then a long, gently curving road through open parkland. A final turn, and through the mist there emerged a castle with conical turrets and low battlements. To Petrie’s distraught imagination it looked like something out of a Bela Lugosi movie. The Dracula fantasies began to harden up.

Petrie and Freya stood with their baggage while the driver did a swift U-turn and took his car back down the hill. They watched it until it had disappeared through the trees, and then turned their attention to the castle.

Petrie knew nothing about castles or history but this one looked like some of the Austrian ones he had glimpsed in the distance on his drive from Vienna. He had a vague memory about the Hapsburg Dynasty and assumed that this had once been Austrian territory and that the castle dated from the eighteenth century. Two warriors, resting their hands on shields, sat on either side of a dark archway. To the right a circular tower was topped by a conical roof looking like a witch’s black hat. Narrow, vertical windows were spaced around the tower giving, Petrie supposed, a clear field of fire in the event of rioting peasantry.

They walked through the archway, which was about twenty feet long, and emerged into an acre of snow-covered garden lightly sprinkled with shrubs and conifer trees. To the left was a parapet looking over open, wooded countryside. To the right, and facing them, were tall grey walls surmounted by steeply sloping roofs, showing red where the snow hadn’t covered them. Between the right and facing walls was a massive rectangular tower, jutting slightly out from the surrounding buildings and half as high again as them. Widely spaced pillars supported a steep roof atop the tower. The roof itself was covered with green diamond-shaped tiles and had tall thin chimneys and a lightning conductor. This tower, Petrie assumed, was intended as a look-out, and a small face was looking down between the pillars. It vanished quickly when Petrie looked up.

Someone had shovelled snow off the pathway and they walked along it, conscious of being overlooked by arched windows which, he noted, were double-glazed. Petrie inferred from this that the interior probably contained modern plumbing and central heating. Just past the tower, and hidden by it from the path, was a massive wooden door, covered with an iron grid and studs, and guarded by nothing more threatening than shrubs in huge stone pots. The door was in three parts and the centre one was an inch ajar. Petrie pushed this door open for Freya and followed her inside. By this simple act, he left behind his old world and entered a new one, more bizarre than anything his imagination could have devised.

His first impression was that of spaciousness. There was a high vaulted ceiling and a gleaming marble floor. A half-circle of velvet-covered sofa faced them. Potted palms and plants occupied odd corners. Broad corridors led off to left and right. There was nobody to be seen.

‘What now?’ Freya wondered.

They took to the right at random, and walked into another spacious area with another high vaulted ceiling, this one supported by tall pillars and with gold-coloured chandeliers suspended from it. Here their footsteps were softened by carpets and long strips of rug scattered around the marble floor. At the far end of this enormous space was a curved stone stairway, and trotting briskly down this stairway was a small, moon-faced man with large round spectacles and a grin.

Charlie Gibson. Last seen, half-drunk and upside down in Uppsala Botanic Gardens, trying to scale the tall gates after closing time with his fly caught on a spike and half a dozen equally merry colleagues offering ribald advice about his future sex life.

Gibson’s handshake was firm and warm. ‘Very glad to see you both. Very glad indeed. First let me take you to your rooms, and then I’ll tell you what exactly is going on.’

Gibson led the way up the stairway, continuing past the first floor to an upper floor, ending up on a long broad corridor with a curved ceiling. Along the left of this corridor were recesses with potted plants and glass cabinets displaying stuffed animals and fossils.

He stopped at the fifth door on the right. ‘This is yours, Tom. Freya, yours is the next one on. There are three of us, five now you’re here, and we have the run of the castle for a week.’

The room was large, well-furnished with a double bed and a bright, substantial adjoining bathroom. Petrie dumped his holdall and jacket on the bed and crossed over to the window. Below him was a terrace with metal tables and chairs, all swept clear of snow. The terrace was bordered by a low parapet and more potted shrubs. The fog was lifting and he could see a village a couple of miles away. Then he went back out to the corridor where Gibson was waiting impatiently. Freya had replaced her boots with light loafers and was wearing gypsy earrings.

Gibson took them back down to the entrance area and they spread themselves around the semi-circular settee. He clasped his hands together and forced a brief smile. ‘First things first. I apologise for the clandestine stuff.’

‘I rather enjoyed it,’ Freya said.

Petrie said, ‘Especially the warning.’

Gibson looked blank. ‘The warning?’

Petrie said, ‘It told me to watch my back. Didn’t you send it?’

Gibson stood up, and paced up and down, looking at the marble floor. Finally he turned to them, a worried look on his face. ‘Christ.’

‘I suggest that you start at the beginning,’ Petrie said gently.

‘What? Oh yes, Tom, yes of course.’ Gibson sat down again. ‘But before we go any further I need one thing more from both of you.’

‘And if you don’t get it?’ Petrie wanted to know.

‘Your air tickets are open returns.’

Freya gave an apprehensive little laugh. ‘I can’t wait to hear this.’

‘For the next four days I want you to remain within the grounds of the castle. You are to have no communication with the outside world without my authorisation. After that, we review the situation.’

Freya and Petrie exchanged glances. Petrie said, ‘Tell us more.’

Gibson looked worried. ‘I can’t. Not without your promise of confidentiality. If you knew what this was about you’d understand.’

Petrie turned to Freya. ‘What do you think?’

She looked doubtful. ‘It sounds military. Maybe a Star Wars thing that I wouldn’t want to touch.’

Gibson’s eyeballs rolled with alarm. ‘I need you. There’s no time to get anyone else.’

Freya smiled happily. ‘You need us. We don’t need you. It looks as if we’re in a strong bargaining position.’

Gibson sat down across from Freya, and sighed. ‘I hate all women.’